Friday, July 21, 2017

Robert Oscar Lopez's Testimony to Texas State Senate on SB-3

Dear Lawmakers,

Thank you for giving me the chance to share this testimony. My name’s Robert Lopez, professor of Humanities at Southwestern Baptist, and I support SB-3.

I have been immersed in the gay community since the early 1970s. I grew up with a gay mom and worked in the mental health clinic she ran from my early teens. I was initiated into sodomy at age 13 by older teens and didn’t get out of the gay community until I was 28. I was hounded, harassed, defamed, threatened, and blacklisted by many gay groups, including the Human Rights Campaign, with the result that in 2016 I was forced out of a tenured faculty position and came to Texas with my wife & children, hoping to find refuge from the gay juggernaut. My crime? I told the ugly truth about what I’d seen in the gay community from the 1970s to the 2010s.

Please consider the context of the efforts to support transgender minors who transition. You are being told that an urgent need exists to help a community that suffered injustice and might resort to suicide or self-harm if their demands are not granted. You are being told that the suffering community is completely innocent, targeted because of irrational bigotry.

This continues a pattern of lies.

In the 70s, these groups promised that once their sexuality was not a crime or stigmatized, they would flourish. Several years later an AIDS epidemic broke out. The activists who wrongly predicted no medical problems with rampant homosexuality proceeded to blame Ronald Reagan and homophobia for a disease that they spread through indiscriminate sodomy.

By the early 90s attention shifted to the military. First with Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, then with its repeal, gay activists promised that open gayness would pose no problems. But after the repeal in 2010, sexual assaults increased, especially same-sex assaults, as did the suicide rate. Without addressing this harm, the activists moved to push for transgender service and integrated showering and billets, even amid the crisis of sexual assault.

By the late 90s, we saw alarming eating disorders caused by gay men’s unhealthy fixation on beauty standards, suicide, drug addiction, domestic violence, steroid abuse, depression, and anxiety. They claimed this wasn’t the fault of gays but of Christian bigotry. They said all could be solved with civil unions, which soon morphed into gay marriage, which then morphed into gay adoption, which then morphed into compulsory changes to school curriculum, elimination of Father’s Day, gender-neutral birth certificates, a boom in paid surrogacy, and fines and penalties on people who expressed opposition to gay marriage on the job or off. Most visible effects of gay marriage have been punitive-life is not better for gays but harder for those considered anti-gay.

In the late 90s, activists said they just wanted to be left alone and allowed to visit each other in the hospital. Soon they declared war on ex-gays and closeted gays, launching a movement to abolish any counseling to people to resist homosexual impulses, even if impulses resulted from abuse. I just returned from York, England, where at gay groups succeeded in getting the Anglican synod to ban prayers for Christians trying to overcome gay impulses. They now have a transgender liturgy.

We can’t take any claims about transgender students at face value. You have to pass this bill because the gay movement is pushing transgender policies in schools and municipalities and will advance quickly absent resistance. Not passing a statewide law preserving normal bathroom policy is the same as a green light for them to force transgenderism onto millions of Texans who don’t want their daughters’ private spaces invaded by this—not because they are bigots, but because they have common sense.

When they say that nobody will be harmed or inconvenienced by transgender policy, they are lying as they lied about every other pro-gay initiative in the past. We will see no benefits for transgenders, abuses we can’t fully foresee, and punishments against those who voice dissent.